COMMENT: We are saddened by the passing of Charles Higham, author and Hollywood biographer whose work included a very important foray into the Nazi Fifth Column in the West, including and especially the U.S. industrialists and financiers who backed the Axis powers of World War II.

EXCERPT: Charles Higham, a prolific celebrity biographer whose books drew vast attention for their memorably vast claims (Errol Flynn was a Nazi spy, Howard Hughes played a central role in Watergate), died on April 21 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81.

His death, apparently of a heart attack, was announced on Wednesday by his friend Todd McCarthy, the chief film critic of The Hollywood Reporter.

Mr. Higham (pronounced HYE-um), who began his career as a poet, wrote some two dozen biographies, whose subjects included Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, Cary Grant and Orson Welles. . . .

. . . But none sent brows quite as high as “Errol Flynn: The Untold Story” (1980), in which Mr. Higham asserted that Flynn, who died in 1959, had spied for Germany during World War II. Though critics faulted the book for building a deductive chain not expressly compelled by the evidence, Mr. Higham defended his methods.

“I don’t have a document that says A, B, C, D, E, Errol Flynn was a Nazi agent,” he said in an interview with The New York Times the year the biography was published. “But I have pieced together a mosaic that proves that he is.” . . .

. . . . His other books include “Trading With the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949” . . .

Discussion

2 comments for “RIP Charles Higham”

I attribute much of my own awakening to “deep politics” to the books of Mr Higham and Dave’s Magnum Opus “How the US Lost WWII”.
RIP Mr Higham.

In possibly related news, researcher Peter Levenda was on “Coast to Coast AM” last night discussing his book on “Hitler’s Escape”. Worth a listen if you can access the stream. Dave also did a show about this a while back which I think was called “Escape of the Wolf”(??).